love rules of thumb. They keep my life simple and my mind unscattered of all the exact figures I calculate on a daily basis. In fact, I recently gave a presentation completely focused on the rules of thumb I use when beginning a solder design or troubleshoot a solder process. Some of you may have seen this presentation at the Thermal News Symposium in Austin.

One of the most valuable rules of thumb that I cite regularly to my thermal interface material customers is:

The Life of a processing device doubles with every 10°C reduction in junction temperature.

I encourage testing the new advanced thermal materialsbecause they can significantly impact this junction temperature. If you can double the life of your device simply by swapping out an old cooling design for one containing the newly engineered products, why not do it?